How Long for the Faking until the Making?
‘Fake it till you make it’ was my favorite piece of marketing advice until I got on social media. As a frequenter of most social media apps, I’ve witnessed first hand a new phenomenon that has confused the bejeezus out of marketers, tech developers and users alike: fake profiles. In 2021 alone, Facebook took down over 1.3 billion fake accounts and yet it remained a nuisance across the tech giant’s smaller social media subsidiary.
The issue isn’t with fake accounts alone. I mean, if you think about it, how bad can it be, right? They’re just lurkers, just dead fish in the ocean. Who are they harming? The truth is that fake accounts are no longer users to be viewed in isolation, but are symptomatic of a much larger revolution that is overtaking social media marketing.
Influencers Influencing
Anyone that has spent five minutes on social media knows that the real power of marketing is wielded by influencers. As it stands, the global influencer market is worth upwards of $13 billion and growing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. 70% of teenagers said that they related more to influencers and were more likely to trust them than real celebrities. A study done by Influencer Marketing Hub showed that 90% of survey respondents found influencer marketing to be a reliable and effective form of marketing. With these astounding statistics, it’s not difficult to imagine why brands are jumping to market via influencers.
The fundamental point of attraction for brands is reach and engagement. Reach matters, and the way to calculate reach is by first and foremost looking at their influencer-of-choice’s followers. Most brands follow this simple formula: the greater the followers → the more popular the account → the greater your reach. That may have been true a few years ago, but the real truth is that the fake account phenomenon has disrupted the market in an indescribable way.
Influencing Influencers
Brands are well aware of this disruption. 67% of brands said that they were concerned about influencer fraud in one way or another, and their concerns are completely legitimate. For those who own small businesses that are dependent on social media engagement, or those whose sustenance now comes from their online presence, social media is very literally a matter of life and death, and, like any old system, the cracks in the wall are beginning to show. Seth Godin said it best:
“When there’s a single metric (likes/followers), we end up looking in the rear-view mirror when we should be driving instead.”
Earlier this year, HBO released a documentary called Fake Famous, a docu-experiment on creating mega influencers by buying followers and likes on their social media. While I’m not a fan of the condescending documentary myself, I do think it raises very pertinent questions about the impact of fake accounts on marketing. Influencer Marketing Hub ran a micro v. macro comparison between Instagram influencer Liv B. (@It’sLivB) and Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian), noting specifically that the former garnered double the engagement on her page with one-tenth of the followers of her celebrity counterpart (and it’s no secret that Kim K has long since joined the legions of celebrities fueling their online presences with fake followers).
Fake followers have become such a marketing headache that significant online figures like Neil Schaffer have written about ways to identify fake influencer followers and avoid them. Let’s face it, brands are learning the hard way that all influencers that glitter are indeed not gold.
We’re moving into a tech-laden world that is slowly overtaking reality as we know it. It’s where opinions are created, lives are impacted, jobs are found, families are reunited, empires are created. So in this world, this artificial man-made bubble that we’ve created for ourselves, where everything has become our legitimate reality, can you really fake it till you make it or will the truth catch up?
